In the past, when someone wanted to make a phone call, they picked up a telephone and made the call. Or if someone wanted to listen to music, they either turned on the radio, tape player or compact disc player. However, nowadays, to make a phone call or listen to music, a person is able to use their computer. Using computers for additional activities does not end with telephones and music. As computing and Internet technology grow, more and more tasks are being transferred to computers.
Although the idea to combine all of these different tasks on one device sounds promising, there are plenty of pitfalls. Standard telephones come fully functional with little setup time. All a user needs to do is contact the phone company to begin the service and then plug the phone cord into a phone jack. After that, the phone should be fully operational. However, setting up a computer to make phone calls requires many different components to be installed correctly, and if any one of them is missing, the phone functionality does not work. For instance, a service must be selected such as Skype™ and the proper software must be downloaded not only for the service, but to allow voice recognition and other features such as echo cancellation to make the phone calling experience enjoyable. Moreover, the correct hardware is needed such as a microphone and speakers. There are many other less apparent components such as sound cards, device drivers and possibly address books that all must be configured properly for the system to function as a phone. This is a lot of components for a person to keep track of. Although users are becoming more computer savvy, there is still a strong need for the process to be simplified for those who do not want to spend a weekend trying to figure out how to turn their computer into a phone or music jukebox.
There are a number of websites that provide services such as Skype™ for telephone services, iTunes® for music services and ofoto.com for photography services, but as described above, these services alone are not all that is required sometimes. Applications are needed to take full advantage of the services. For example, if a user downloads music through iTunes®, but does not have a music player application, the music files are useless. If users have to search throughout the billions of web pages to figure out how to listen to music on their computer, they are likely to be deterred, and thus the growing potential of computers and the Internet is lost.